


Dangerous Liaisons

by Francesca_Wayland



Series: Dangerous Liaisons [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Adlock, Drabbles, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-17
Updated: 2016-11-30
Packaged: 2018-01-16 03:25:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 5,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1330141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Francesca_Wayland/pseuds/Francesca_Wayland
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of Adlock one-shots that I will continue to update whenever inspiration strikes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one-shot takes place immediately after After Midnight, and reading that will put this into better context (though it isn’t necessary).

“You’re friends with John on Facebook,” Sherlock asked in the guise of a statement the following morning over tea, as if ten hours hadn’t passed since they’d moved on that topic of conversation.

“Oh I’ve been friends with John for years,” she said dismissively, flipping through a recent back-issue of _The Economist._ “Since before you and I met.”

Sherlock looked up from his newspaper, and his demanding stare drilled into Irene’s forehead until she glanced up as well.

“It was one of the ways in which I did my due diligence on you, and it’s been a good way to keep tabs beyond the blog.”

“But—”

“I used pictures of my very photogenic driver and invented an entire identity, ‘Margo Zelle,’” she said, anticipating his question.

She closed the magazine and her lips curled into a devious smile. “It was quite fun, and just as easy as you might expect to reel in the dear doctor. He’s rather forward you know, but Margo has been able to remain just elusive enough to keep him interested. I still chat with him from time to time to ensure I survive any social network cull, although now that he’s engaged I might have to adjust my strategy a bit...”

“You _flirted_ with John Watson,” Sherlock said, his displeasure at this news evident.

For some reason Irene chuckled with delight at that, and she leaned towards him and asked with a provocative spark in her eye, “Jealous?”

Then without waiting for him to respond, apart from the withering look he threw her way, she corrected, “Not me, _Margo_ ,” and went back to her reading.

Sherlock frowned, disgruntled with the idea of Irene and John carrying on a years-long flirtation, and worse, Sherlock being un _aware_ of it. That Irene had just been using John to keep track of Sherlock, and that John was oblivious to her real identity were immaterial; he still felt irrational flares of irritation at his friend and possessiveness over The Woman.

In fact, Sherlock was tempted to inform John that Irene was still alive and well, just so that he could let John know that the woman he had been ( _unsuccessfully_ , he couldn’t help but add) attempting to pull for so many years was _The_ Woman, whom he’d believed dead.

It would defer some of the responsibility of the deception onto John, since he’d had plenty of opportunity to figure out the truth, but never had. Even better, Sherlock could also use John’s inevitable guilt to manipulate him into being less angry over the matter, since John had always insinuated that he knew Sherlock had feelings for Irene.

Sherlock’s lips pulled back into a one-sided smirk in anticipation of John’s reaction. Yes, unless a compelling case came up, that might be just the thing to do for weekend plans.

But first...

The smirk dropped from his mouth, and with narrowed eyes he whipped open his laptop, logged into his own alias on Facebook, clicked in the search bar, and typed in: _Margo Zelle._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two things:  
> 1\. Sherlock's a dick  
> 2\. Margaret Zelle was the real name of Mata Hari, the infamous and seductive WWI spy.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally for Tumblr user the-redhead-in-a-dress

Irene shut off the taps of the shower then wrapped an Egyptian cotton towel around herself and opened the adjoining door into Sherlock’s room, where she found him in bed looking at one of his laptops with an endearingly annoyed expression on his face. When he heard her come in to the bedroom he swung his head around, and she noticed his pupils swell at the sight of her.

He openly stared at her for several seconds, and she felt a smile tug at the corner of her mouth under his scrutiny.

“I’m bored,” he said, the way someone else might have said, "I want you.” The growl in his voice and the glint in his eye as he slammed the cover of his laptop shut without looking away from her made his meaning even clearer.

She sauntered over to the bed and put one knee up on the mattress, then leaned forward. His nose scrunched as her wet hair dripped onto his bare forearm, and he griped, “You’re all wet.”

She smirked and kissed him, then turned her head and said into his ear with a suggestive purr, “Yes I am. Fortunately I think you’ll find that your problem and mine have a solution in common...”

It took him a moment before her meaning clicked and he understood the insinuation, and though he should have found the vulgarity distasteful, he found himself experiencing precisely the opposite reaction.


	3. Chapter 3

Sherlock kissed Irene in the same manner he approached everything else that aroused his interest: with intensity, precision, and absolute focus. Even when they both became more unbridled and aggressive there remained an element of finesse and deliberateness in the way his lips moved against hers and he tilted his face to deepen the joining of their mouths. It was very him; no other man or woman had ever kissed her in quite the same way, and she suspected that no one else had ever been kissed in quite the same way by Sherlock Holmes, either.

Still, she liked it best, and it thrilled her most, when she sensed him lose that last remnant of acuity and conscientiousness to become just like every other lover in the final throes of ecstasy. When he proved to her what she had so long imagined: that beneath the buttoned-up suit tailored to him like armour and the intellect he wielded as both shield and sword there was a man capable of intense passion, and when he stripped himself of both, that passion burned. Each one of those instances—when their parted lips grazed together and they shared panted breaths, then reconnected in urgent, uncoordinated kisses, or he groaned low through an open mouth pressed next to her cheekbone, his eyes squeezed shut—was a victory and a validation, for both of them.

Because the journey to reach such a point had been long and often very painful, and the reward hard-earned. On each of their parts it had taken confusion at the most fundamental level, betrayal, multiple near-death experiences, and an unprecedented amount of personal courage to arrive at a point when thought, even the most prurient of calculations, could be overwhelmed by base intuition, and they could embrace all the inherent vulnerability that came with that. And so when she felt him fully lose himself with her, and she did the same with him, every challenge they had faced both together and apart was vindicated.

Pleasure balanced with pain, neither Irene nor Sherlock could or would have it any other way.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally for Tumblr users TheReichenbachQueen and sherenekillme

Somehow the texts always came when Sherlock Holmes least expected them. She seemed to have a sixth sense for knowing the best possible time to catch the Consulting Detective bored, or in a rare bout of loneliness, or even thinking about her.

This time he had been staring at the wilted single rose on his bedside table and telling himself that he should’ve binned it days ago. (Or now, he could, _should_ just bin it now, why wasn’t he?) Her revised text alert made him jerk, and the timing was so uncanny that he wondered if she somehow had him under surveillance.

He fished his phone out of his pocket and checked the screen, feeling his face warm.

_SW5 9PD_

Like every other time The Woman texted him, all he got was a postcode. The exact location, the hotel’s room number: those were up to him to figure out, and they weren’t always in London.

Sherlock had it easy this time around; there was only one hotel on that stretch of road in Earls Court. Five months ago she had given him the postcode for Park Lane, where there were half a dozen major hotels and over a thousand cumulative rooms and suites. He had been very motivated though, and it had taken him less than two hours to locate her. Her pleasure at his swiftness and his rush of triumph at locating her had combined with explosive results and that had been one of their most memorable liaisons yet, but he was relieved that this location was so much more straight-forward. Tonight he was far more interested in getting to see her again than he was in the thrill of the chase.

He strode down the corridor pulling on his coat and scarf, and then jogged down the stairs wearing a half-smile of anticipation. His best time yet from when he received her text to when he knocked on her door was twenty-three and one-fifth minutes, give or take a few seconds. Between the light traffic across London at one in the morning and his eagerness to reach her, he suspected that tonight he would beat that record. 


	5. Chapter 5

Sherlock never spoke on the phone when he was able to text, but Irene Adler was a notable exemption to that practice. He often found that when he was in the grips of post-case euphoria, there was nothing he would rather do than phone her and tell her everything. Recounting each detail with someone he knew could actually follow his thought process and even anticipate some of his breakthroughs allowed him to relive the excitement of the solution, as well as helped him to ease out of that manic frame of mind without the abrupt crash back into boredom he often experienced otherwise. And perhaps part of him always savoured showing off for her, just a bit.

He had procured for her a quad-band phone with GSM and UMTS that she had half-playfully, half-derisively termed 'The Batphone', and which she deigned to answer roughly a third of the times he rang.

Fortunately on this occasion he had apparently caught her in a generous mood, though she did seem a touch inattentive as he explained to her how he was able to track down the lead designer in one of the UK's largest forgery and money laundering rings using the analysis of poly-cotton fibres, a disguise as a Central St. Martins art student, and CCTV footage from a Chalk Farm laundrette.

Despite her lack of active participation he felt himself winding down, and by the time the conversation was coming to a natural end his stomach was rumbling and his eyelids were growing heavy. But instead of simply ending the call as usual, The Woman did something she had never done, and that Sherlock never could have anticipated.

"I love you," she said in an off-hand sort of way, then hung up.

Sherlock was paralysed for the duration of a heartbeat, and then he reacted to those words the way he would respond to the sound of a gun being cocked against the back of his skull. His entire body felt as if it had been plunged into ice and every sense honed into high-alert. Not because of the conventional meaning of the phrase, because it didn't even occur to him as an expression of sentiment. She had never said that before, and it was so completely out of character that he couldn't imagine that she ever _would_ state such a thing, especially not so casually and out of context.

That left only one other explanation, which he had grasped almost at once: she was in danger. Someone, some threat, had been present when he had called, and she'd wanted to tip off Sherlock without alerting the threat.

The sanguine, calm feeling he'd achieved after speaking with Irene receded like a tide before an oncoming tsunami, and he felt his mind rev into high gear once more.

He didn't know where she was—he almost never did when they were apart—but he'd be damned if he wouldn't act on whatever evidence he could to locate her, particularly when she had actually reached out for his help as much as she could.

Six hours later he arrived at the door of the Baroque-style flat in Ljubljana, his heart pounding at what he might find on the other side. He didn't give potential attackers the chance to prepare; he aimed a sharp, strong kick at the lock then shouldered his way through, blood thrumming through his veins and adrenaline slowing down time.

Inside, Irene Adler sat alone in the middle of a button tufted sofa, wearing a scrap of a lace-trimmed dressing gown and a sharp smile, and holding a glass of some rich amber liquid. There was a corresponding glass on the coffee table in front of her, with ice cubes that hadn't lost their sharp edges, and without a trace of condensation. The Woman was safe, that was... good, but did the other glass belong to the suggested threat, and did its evident freshness indicate that that person still here?

"Right on time," Irene announced.

He ignored her, scanning his eyes around the flat as his chest rose and fell with his heavy breathing.

"What happened, are they gone?" he asked in a demanding rush.

"Are who gone?" she asked, and took a sip from her drink.

"The—your attackers, the person or persons threatening you," he all but shouted, although he was beginning to suspect that he had somehow misjudged the situation.

"It's just me, Sherlock. No attackers, no threats."

He stared at her. If the statement hadn't been code, then that meant...

"But on the phone. You said—" He trailed off, closed his mouth, then opened it again, but he couldn't complete the sentence.

"Yes, and now here you are knocking down doors to see me. Most girls might take that for reciprocation."

"No, I—that's not—" He closed his eyes lightly, feeling disorientated in the way only The Woman could trigger.

When he opened them again he saw that her innocent expression had morphed into a sharp smile, and a look of mischief was dancing in her eyes.

"Oh let me guess. You thought it was so out of character that I must be trying to convey that I was in danger, and it was imperative that you get over to me as soon as possible, which you did. I take it you tracked me through the background noise of the market?" She gave a mild smirk. "I stood on my terrace so that you would better hear it."

"I was just able to discern the Ljubljana accent from some of the shouting vendors," he confirmed, though distractedly.

"I figured you could, after the time you spent here last year," she cut in, and he gave a short nod.

"I looked up which market was held on Sundays, and where. Then I scanned the doorbell nameplates of buildings in the immediate vicinity for a recognisable alias. That part took less than twenty minutes."

"And just six hours in total. Impressive—that's probably the best time possible." She crossed her legs, and the hem of the peignoir rode even further up her thighs.

"Not that I expected anything less," she added. She tipped her head towards the glass with its fresh ice, and he realised belatedly that it was intended for him.

He flushed, though a small part of it was from arousal at the way she had set up the game, and how perfectly she had predicted his arrival.

"It was a baited line."

She was completely impenitent, and just gave a flippant shrug, her eyes still sparkling. "I wanted to see you, and here you are..."

"That's not—that isn't fair," he said with some reproach.

"Since when do I play fair?" she asked, setting the scotch down, then rising from the couch and walking towards him. "Besides, you know what Francis Smedley said."

He shook his head at her, furrowing his brow. "Who?"

At that her smile widened to reveal glinting white teeth. "Oh, then let me take the credit: 'All's fair in love and war.'"

She watched her hands as they slid up the lengths of his jacket lapels, and then she flicked her eyes up to meet his.

"And I like to think that what we have is a little bit of both..."

At that she grasped the fabric in her hands and leaned up on her toes to press her mouth onto his. Before he could even react, she had drawn back to murmur against his lips, "Plus I've seen your wall. I know you get bored, too..."

"Is that what this was - a cure for boredom," he asked, and there was recrimination in his voice, though he had been going for indifference.

She leaned back, her face alight with amusement, which Sherlock found condescending and enticing in equal measure.

"Perhaps not only that. But if it were, it wouldn't just be mine. You're welcome."

"I didn't thank you," he snapped, though the low breathiness that had started to creep into his voice lessened the effect.

She just continued to look up at him, apparently delighted with his struggle to remain detached-seeming.

"Not yet," she said. "But you will."

He straightened his shoulders, though she didn't let go of his lapels. "This won't work again, you realise."

Her smile deepened again, so that he could see the suggestion of a dimple in her left cheek.

"Yes, but that doesn't matter," she answered. "Surely _you_ realise that I'll always have something else that will."

His lips tightened but the tic was as good as an outright admission.

"Besides. Maybe I just felt like saying it. Just the once; just to see how you would react. Now I know."

Something about her insinuating tone made Sherlock want to swallow hard, though he resisted the urge.

Instead he narrowed his eyes at her and said sharply, "I haven't said anything to—"

"Actions speak louder than words, dear."

Sherlock rolled his eyes, but it was compensation for the anxiety he felt at how close they were veering to a certain taboo subject.

"If you're just going to talk to me in clichés, I'm leaving," he growled.

"Oh, so that one you do know," she said teasingly.

He made as if he were heading to the door, but she called his bluff.

"You've come all this way, at least have a drink with me before you go."

He paused, then turned back towards her. "I prefer not t—"

"You've just finished a case, an important one from what you told me."

She closed the distance between them and ran her hand down his forearm before taking his hand, and his heart predictably sped up at the sensation of her fingers entwining with his.

"Let's celebrate."

"I don't—" he started, sounding hoarse as he looked down into her gleaming blue eyes.

"Besides," she spoke over him again, obviously sensing that her victory was near, if not already won. "It's the Macallan 1939, 40 years old, and I can't think of anyone who could understand and appreciate all that went into producing it as much as you. The precise selection of ingredients, determining the perfect balance and ratio of those ingredients, perfecting the distillation procedure, all the chemical and aging processes that resulted in this liquor, which had already reached initial maturity by the time we were born..."

He couldn't look away from her lips as she spoke, and the rich timbre of her voice held just as much appeal as the attractive way she described the production of the Scotch.

"One drink," he allowed stiffly, and her lips curved into an exultant smile as she led him back to the sofa.

He returned to London four days later.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is continued in my story, 'A Conditioned Response,' which can be found here: http://archiveofourown.org/works/4294740, and is rated M.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that this vignette is Rated M.

Sherlock naturally tends towards drama and dynamism in his public life, and to Irene’s great pleasure she discovers that he’s no different in private.

Before, she had imagined that he’d require coaxing after his years of repression and emulating the cold-blooded elder Holmes, but the very act of consummation caused that dam to burst, and the fervor he shows now is matched only by his reactions to the most compelling of cases. His proclivities skew towards the vanilla but it doesn’t matter; he’s such a force of nature that even the most basic acts are combustive.

He doesn’t always let her have her way, which she finds she likes. He’s just as much a challenge in bed as he is out of it, and just as contrary. Together they learn that his brand of charming insolence works very well on her, but neither of them is surprised.

Sometimes he is driven and relentless, and won’t let them rest until he’s managed to have her in all the ways he’s predetermined. Other times he’s lazy and laissez-faire and just lies back as she rolls over him, moving only his fingertips in feather-light circles against her outer thighs.

There is one constant. Frenetic or slow, wild or sensuous, he always looks at her as if she’s the single most enthralling and fascinating mystery he’s ever encountered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I made a very NSFW gifset to go with this, which you can find here: http://francesca-wayland.tumblr.com/post/127176312139/sherlock-naturally-tends-towards-drama-and


	7. Folie à Deux

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Tumblr user Sorrowsflower.

Mary had once got ahold of Sherlock’s phone - his personal one as he had dozens – and for weeks after she’d teased him about the obscure and inane apps he had, although at the time she’d seemed most delighted by the Snapchat app.

“A little old for that, aren’t we?” she had crowed.

He’d had a cover story ready, had in fact already concocted one for this exact scenario.

“It was for a case,” he’d said in a bored drawl. “I needed to masquerade as a teenaged girl in order to entrap a Gumtree predator last month – took an evening. I’d delete it but the persona has become useful. I didn’t have an adolescent in circulation before and it’s amazing how responsive and careless a certain sort of man will be with her.”

John had made a disgusted face but Mary’s gaze had sharpened and become sardonic, and she’d opened her mouth to call him out on the lie, but then closed it again and turned away, changing the subject. She must have seen the sudden tensing of his face and had let the matter drop; her discretion was one of the many reasons he adored John’s choice in spouse.

Mary, of course, had been correct. Unlike the ever-cycling series of apps consuming memory on his phone, this one was… recreational.

He had received an invitation to download it in his inbox several weeks prior and had nearly deleted it before he’d seen IA_TW. Either ‘IA’ stood for _I am_ or a name or both, but regardless, recognition was instantaneous and exhilarating.

Heart pounding, he had clicked on the invite and then immediately accepted the contact, and almost overnight the app had become a near fixation since then. It wasn’t sexting, but it was something that came very close to it. He supposed that it was _their_ version of that—his, and The Woman’s.

Without explanation, instruction, or pretext she had presented him with a game, and he quickly realised that it was similar to one he’d sometimes caught on telly as a kid. In it the presenter would show an extreme close-up of something and gradually pull the camera out until it became clearer what the image depicted.

This was the adult version.

She sends him a picture, which she sets on a three second display interval so that he can’t just take all the time he wanted to scrutinise it. For every correct identification of the object she removes an item of clothing and sends him another picture – but one thing guess or detail and she stops responding, and the game only resumes again at her whim. Sometimes it will be weeks, and other times it will be months, and so the sting of being wrong is always compounded by the knowledge that he will be bereft of her for a time, and he’s in a position of total powerlessness to change that.

With anyone else he would consider the game silly and trite, but with her it’s a kind of thrill he has never really experienced before, and its intermittent and unexpected nature enhances that.

They both know that it’s giving him a chance to make the deductions that are the true seduction. Getting to see her naked form is symbolic of the real victory and the real rush, since after all he has had her form memorised—every freckle, every faint blemish, every crease at elbow and behind the knee—since the day he met her. Everything else, how that body looks in motion above him or in the grips of pleasure, has been jealously secreted away since then. And yet it isn’t a straight-forward game that he might play with someone else, either. He can’t deny the sexual element, especially when every autonomic physical system is broadcasting it.

It keeps them in each other’s orbits, and intellectually close. Though their relationship is unconventional and intentionally without labels or constraints, it’s still a long-distance affair and holds all the challenges inherent with that. And though both of them like to believe and exude the attitude that they could walk away at any time, that nothing more than a chance for diversion keeps them in touch, they also both know that it’s a lie, a _folie a deux._

It was late afternoon, with golden light slanting down at an angle into the front room and illuminating all the dust motes in the air, when Sherlock was scrolling through the inbox of John’s blog scanning for something marginally interesting. Snapchat’s alert sounded to his right, interrupting his concentration, and his head whipped up as his heart began to slam against his ribs in an automatic conditioned response. A closed-mouth grin pushing onto his face, he reached for his phone.  
  
This time it really was like that old game-show challenge: the photo was an extreme close up of the bridge of a nose and the crease of a brow. It looked like a black and white photograph given the subject was in greyscale, but without seeing more Sherlock couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman. And yet something about it struck him as very familiar.  
  
The image disappeared and his fingers flew over his phone’s screen, replying, “Someone I know.”

He quickly added as a precautionary measure, “or know of.”

“Which is it?” fired back her response.

He pursed his lips, then took an educated guess that due to the greyscale of the picture it was older and therefore the latter was more likely.

“Know of.”

He knew he got it right when another image popped up on his screen.

Unlike the usual protocol where she revealed more of the given scene for his perusal, this was a different image entirely, although it was another close-up. His eyes darted over the image of a bird-eye view of books, and once again he couldn’t shake the sensation that he ought to understand their significance. The books appeared in muted violets and greys from being in shadows, and he couldn’t discern the titles since the photo was taken from above, but in the short time allotted – no screen shots allowed, unless he wanted to forfeit – he could just barely detect by the thickness of their paper, the slight uneven finish of their bindings that they were probably early to mid-twentieth century. The uniform look of them suggested that they were part of a collection, and at that combined with their era and the fact that they were leather-bound books indicated that they were academic.

“Well?” came her prompt.

His lips compressed into a thinner line and he took a short breath through his nose before he typed, “An anthology of twentieth century academic works. Likely 1950s.”

He waited, and after a moment he realised he was holding the breath he had taken and he let it out in a low, unsteady gust.

He stared at his phone, but it remained unresponsive. Had he been incorrect about the genre of the books? It was unlikely; more likely was that he had got the dates wrong since it was possible that the collection was published as late as the 1970s.

That was the danger in being too specific. In his eagerness to show off he’d list as many details as he could observe, but one incorrect element invalidated the whole.

Disappointment welled up inside him. An incomplete game was frustrating not just for the personal aspects of losing, and losing communication with her for a time, but because Irene never told him the answers that he got wrong, and it was the mental equivalent of _coitus interruptus_.

He heaved a low sigh, but just as he let the phone drop from his fingertips it vibrated again, and with a resurgence of excitement he brought the screen to his face.

It was a textile of some sort, and it looked rough-hewn though that could be due to the extremely close view of the shot. Unfortunately the focus wasn’t sharp enough for him to determine the type of wool, and the colours were still desaturated in the dusky light, but the weave of the material struck him once again as utterly familiar. He recognised it, but from _where_?

He used the last second of the image’s display time to burn it into his mind, and then he leaned back, letting his eyes unfocus so that he could mentally examine it.

In his mind he felt the heft of the fabric, felt the pattern of its weave with his fingertips, and it struck him as oddly sensuous.

And then suddenly he knew what the last image had captured, knew what _all_ the images were.

How could it have taken him so long to realise? It was a combination of her usual effect on his facilities, and that the notion was so impossible as not to even occur to him.

At once his entire body went rigid and his aural awareness took primacy as he became hyper-attuned for any sounds from down the hall in his bedroom.

He couldn’t hear anything, but he wasn’t going to rely on that sense alone. He dropped his phone with a loud thud, then shoved away from the table and crossed the room to stride down the hall, his heartbeat pounding loud against his eardrums.

The first image hadn’t been a greyscale photograph at all, but a detail of his bust of Goethe. The books, a bound anthology of works by Robert Burns Woodward, had been a present from his parents when he’d finally graduated from Imperial, and the textile – well, there was a reason that image had evoked such sensual connotations in the context of Irene Adler, since it was of the blanket that covered his bed.

He jerked the knob to his bedroom door and thrust it open so that it knocked hard against the wall and sent minor tremors up through the floorboards. They was nothing to the tremors making their way through him.

His eyes zeroed in on the centre of his room, and on the final piece of the puzzle. The object of the game is to determine Irene’s present location and though he had ‘won’ several times in the past, there had never been a victory quite like this.

Irene Adler was poised on the blanket, nude except for the phone she propped up under her chin, highlighting the Cheshire Cat grin on her face.


End file.
